What's Been Found
by 13chapters
Summary: Kat goes hunting. She has no idea what she's doing. Fortunately, there's someone there to help her out.    A/N: In case you've forgotten, Kat makes an appearance in the S1 episode Asylum.  She was such a badass, I'm pretty sure she'd be a great hunter.


The door isn't closed – the wood is so warped that it probably isn't even possible to close it anymore – and Kat enters slowly, swings the flashlight around a bit. The slanted light of the late afternoon makes its way through the cracks in the boarded up windows, but it isn't enough to break through the gloom. It was probably a nice house once, Kat figures. Big enough, that's for sure. She makes her way through room after room, choosing her steps cautiously. Now it's mostly dust and heat and rotting wood. Generations of teenagers have covered it with declarations of love and hate and sex, and the distinct smell of urine stings Kat's nose.

Kat's still examining the front room, reading the graffiti, when she hears footsteps behind her. A spike of adrenaline rushes through her body as she freezes. Shit. What the fuck was she thinking, coming here? She breathes in the dusty air and prays. She didn't believe in god before, but now she knows there are ghosts and demons and monsters, so there's probably a god, too.

_I was just trying to be a good person_, she tells him.

"Who the hell are you?" The voice belongs to a woman. Surprised – and suddenly, shockingly relieved that her ambusher is a living, breathing human – Kat turns around.

The woman is half hidden by the shadows, but Kat can see the shape of her. She's small and blonde, all angles and lines but for the curls in her hair. She looks like she's maybe a couple years older than Kat, but the steady grip she's got on the shotgun pointed at Kat makes her seem more. More mature, more capable.

"I'm Kat," she gets out. Her voice is hoarse. "I'm here to stop the O'Donnell ghost."

The woman raises her eyebrows, holds her shotgun steady.

"You and me both," she says, looking Kat up and down. By her expression, she isn't impressed. "You a hunter?"

Kat flushes.

"I'm sort of new at it," she admits. "This…this is my second hunt. My first hunt on my own." She neglects to mention that her first hunt had been unintentional, that she'd been dumb and needed rescuing.

A slow, knowing smile appears on the woman's face and for just a moment, Kat is sure she's a dead woman. But then the shotgun is lowered, and Kat lets out a slow breath.

"Everyone has to start somewhere," the woman says. She wipes her right hand against her pants and Kat realizes that maybe she's not the only one who's surprised to run into another human on a hunt. "I'm Jo."

"Hi. Um. I'm Kat." Kat says, feeling awkward. She watches Jo pull off a backpack and drop it heavily to the floor. Jo slumps against a wall and slides down until she's sitting on the ground, her shotgun across her knees. She looks bored, and kind of annoyed. Like hunting a ghost is a tiresome chore you have to do occasionally. Like taking out the garbage, or washing the dishes, maybe.

"You think the ghost will show?" Kat ventures.

Jo looks up at her. "Yeah," she says. "The lore is pretty clear about this one. Regular as clockwork. Five people killed by this ghost over the last fifteen years, too. These annual-type ghosts, they luck out, because they only appear once a year, and that lowers the likelihood that any given year, a hunter's going to be in the neighborhood to take it out. But this year he's not so lucky." Jo grins briefly before adding: "Also gotta make sure no civilians who thought it might be fun to check out a haunted house don't get hurt, of course."

"I'm not a civilian," Kat protests, although she's not sure she's being honest.

"I know you're not," Jo says. "Don't worry, Kat. Like I said, we all start somewhere. Come on over here," she says, patting the floor next to her. "We got some time to kill."

Kat obeys, and settles herself next to Jo. She can feel the warmth of Jo's body next to her own where their legs line up. Kat rests the flashlight on her right leg, pointing up at the ceiling and watches the millions of dust motes float through the air.

"Why'd you get into this?" Jo asks. She's close. Her breath smells pink, like bubble gum. "You lose someone?"

"No," Kat says slowly. She's never talked about what happened before, not even with Gavin. "I nearly died. In a place kinda like this, actually. I was the dumb civilian. But I got rescued, by a couple of hunters. That was a couple years ago. Ever since, it's like…I've felt guilty for doing anything, now that I know what's out there. I go to the University of Arizona and I heard about this place and I thought." She pauses. "I guess I figured I could do for someone else what those guys did for me."

Jo nods, like she understands and Kat figures she does. It's surprisingly comforting, and when Jo presses against her, Kat doesn't draw away. Jo pushes a lock of hair behind her ears, and even in the dim light, Kat can see the ugly purple bruise on her left temple.

"What happened?" she asks. She makes an instinctive move to touch the bruised skin, to sooth it, before she realizes that that it's not her business, she has no right.

"Nothing," Jo says. "Just a haunting in Vegas, before I came here." She shrugs like it's not a big deal. Kat wonders if she'll ever be able to brush things off like that.

"You get used to it," Jo says, like she's reading Kat's thoughts. "Comes with the territory."

"I guess it's a good thing I'm still on my mom's insurance," Kat says with a shaky laugh.

Jo pats Kat's leg, and leans forward.

"You'll be fine, Kat," Jo says. Her brown eyes are warm, and without planning to, Kat finds herself leaning toward Jo. After a moment, Jo smiles and pulls back, leans heavily against the wall.

Kat feels hot and lazy, like she thinks a cat in a patch of sunlight might. The house protects them from the worst of the desert heat, but it's still warm, and stuffy. She's almost forgotten why she's even there when a pounding noise from upstairs jolts her out of her reverie.

"Shit," Jo says, scrambling to her feet. "It's the ghost."

"I don't have my gun," Kat whispers, panicking. _God, what the fuck was I thinking? Dumbest goddamn thing I've ever done._

"You don't have a gun?" Jo asks.

"No, I _have_ a gun, I just left it in the car! I was just going to check the house out first, you know? Then I got all distracted!" Kat is frantic. She's not really comfortable walking around armed yet, and now she's going to pay the price.

Jo makes an annoyed sound.

"Too late to do anything about that now," she says. She digs around the backpack for a moment, eventually coming up with a sheathed knife – practically a sword, really. She hands it over.

"Don't use it against anything natural," she warns. "It's solid silver and gets damaged easily." She checks her rifle and appears satisfied with whatever she has loaded into it – Kat doesn't know if it's silver or salt or what. She has rock salt in her own rifle, which she bought at Wal-Mart and sawed off using instructions she found on the internet.

Kat swings the knife around a little. It's not as heavy as she was expecting.

From upstairs, there's another thumping noise.

"You know anything about knives?" Jo asks. Kat shakes her head, adds that to the mental list of things to look up when she gets home. If she lives through this, that is. Jo hands her a flashlight. It's heavier and fancier than her own, like something someone who skulked in the dark professionally would have.

"Be careful then," Jo tells her. Kat hadn't even noticed that the sun had finished setting and the night is quickly growing darker. She switches on the flashlight, illuminating the hallway toward the stairs. Above them, there's another bang, louder than the first two.

"No one knows where O'Donnell is," Jo says, as she takes a tentative first step onto the stairs. When it holds, she stands more firmly.

"I know," Kat says, a little affronted that Jo thinks she's so green she didn't even google the house first. "I did the research. No one's ever found his body."

"I doubt they've looked much," Jo says. "People are too afraid of this house. But it sounds like he didn't leave much, so it's…it's probably around here somewhere." Her voice trembles a little, and Kat is inexplicably relieved to realize that Jo is scared, too.

Something occurs to her.

"Why don't we just burn down the house?" she asks in a low voice. "We could get out of here, just…burn it down."

Jo shakes her head.

"It'd draw too much attention," she says. "We don't want the authorities coming down on us. Hunters try to operate under the radar, you know?"

Kat nods as she follows Jo onto the landing of the second floor. And freezes.

The ghost is there. Its shape is smaller than Kat had expected, like a very old man. It looks solid, but the light that seems to emanate from it disabuses Kat of any notions that it could a human standing there.

The fight is a bit of a blur. Later, Kat can only remember it in bits and pieces. The ear-shattering noise of Jo's rifle is there. And so is the sickening sensation of the silver knife cutting through what feels like flesh. The pain of getting slammed to the floor. The moment when Kat looks up and sees the ghost advance on Jo and the terror that she would be left alone to fight, and to die.

Later, Kat isn't even sure how that didn't happen.

In the end, it's Kat who finds O'Donnell's body when she falls – is thrown, really – through a rotting wall and finds herself next to the skeleton that seems even smaller than the shape of the ghost.

They salt and burn the body right there, and it's a good thing they didn't try to burn the place down after all – the rest of the house, even here with the wood dried out from the desert air, doesn't catch fire. Kat watches the flames flicker, trying to get control of her body. The shaking will probably stop eventually, she figures. In the firelight, Jo looks almost like a supernatural being herself.

This time Kat leads the way out of the house, Jo silent at her heels.

"Thanks," Kat says, handing back the knife. "I won't forget my gun next time." She laughs shakily, and is about to get back into her car when Jo calls out her name.

"You want to go get a drink?" Jo asks.

"I'm not legal," Kat admits.

"Oh." Jo pauses. "Well, come back to my motel room, we'll get some beer or something. Or do you have to get back home right away?"

Kat has class in less than 24 hours, but there's an invitation in Jo's voice that there's no way she's turning down.

They end up getting some beer at an all-night liquor store. The kid at the store doesn't even blink an eye at their bloody and bruised appearance, and Kat has to wonder what he must see every day to be so nonchalant. In the harsh lights of the store, Kat can see Jo clearly for the first time. She's tiny and beautiful and she has a smear of blood on her left cheek that she didn't quite succeed at wiping away. She's limping. Kat is pretty sure she looks worse – the whole right side of her body is one big bruise where she hit the wall, and she's moving like a little old lady.

Jo's motel room is small and worn, but clean. It doesn't look like it's been redecorated since the '70s – the walls are a burnt orange and the bedspread is a faded avocado green. It reminds Kat of her grandparents' den; it's strangely comforting. Jo flicks on the light next to the bed. It barely illuminates the room, for which Kat is glad.

Jo picks up the remote control and flips on the TV. There's cable, and she finds some teen soap that Kat was embarrassingly into when she was in high school.

"Oh man, I had such a crush on him when I was fifteen," Kat says with a laugh, watching the screen. She's leaning against the headboard of the bed. The pillows feel amazing. Kat is pretty sure she's never going to get up again.

"Me too, but I was seventeen," Jo says from the foot of the bed. She takes a sip of her beer, leaning back on her left hand.

"How long have you been doing this?" The words are out before Kat can consider if she's being too intrusive.

Jo doesn't ask her what she means. "About a year and a half," she says. "I'm from a hunting family, though, so…it was really only a matter of time."

Kat tries to imagine what that would be like, growing up knowing that monsters and ghosts were real. She takes a long gulp out of the beer can. It's sour and she's pretty sure she doesn't really like it, but she doesn't want to seem uncool in front of Jo, who is beautiful in the dim light.

They watch the rest of the show in silence, but Kat can barely pay attention. She thinks she should be freaking out more, but the exhaustion deep in her bones seem to be clearing her mind, easing her worry. It's enough to be alive. Kat finishes her beer and puts the empty can on the bedside table before shifting, lying down on her stomach.

Jo walks her hands back along the bed until she's on her back, turns her head so that she's facing Kat. They're only a couple inches apart.

"I'm really glad I met you," Kat says. "Like, I-think-you-saved-my-life glad."

Jo just laughs softly.

"You would have done okay without me," she says. "But just for the record, I'm glad I met you too, Kat."

And even though the angle is weird and Kat has never done anything like this before, Kat fought a ghost today and she is brave and can do anything and she leans across the inches and kisses Jo.

Jo doesn't seem surprised. She kisses back easily, opening her mouth. She shoves herself up, twisting around so that she and Kat are facing the same direction. She's careful of Kat's injured right side, easing her body along her left until they are once again face to face.

"Is this okay?" Jo asks, leaning down. Kat just nods, and Jo kisses her again.

Kat hasn't kissed a lot of people in her life. She had a boyfriend in eighth grade, but their fumbling kisses were awkward and left Kat wondering why anyone would want to do this. Then there was Gavin, who made her think that maybe kissing was pretty cool after all. She got drunk at a frat party her first week of college and ended up making out with an equally drunk guy for half an hour before her roommate came and dragged her away. It had seemed nice at the time, but kind of gross later.

This is different from all of those, Kat thinks as she pulls away for a quick breath. She doesn't think it's because of Jo, though. It's not because Jo's a girl. She's pretty sure of it. It's because of _herself_. The difference is that _Kat_ is different.

The thought emboldens her, and she shoves up against Jo, kisses her harder. She wishes she could roll over and take control, but the ache in her side lets her know that would be a bad idea, and it's not like she can complain when Jo trails her mouth over to Kat's ear, sucking on her earlobe briefly before tonguing a line down Kat's neck.

Kat has her hands halfway up Jo's t-shirt, running her fingers under the tight elastic of Jo's bra, when Jo pulls away.

"Have you done this before?" Jo asks. She's flushed and breathless. Kat just shakes her head.

"Not with a girl," Kat says. She doesn't add that she's barely done it with a guy.

"Me neither," Jo tells her, and she grins wide. But Kat can see that she's nervous, and she pulls Jo back in, strokes the back of her neck.

"Let's get some sleep," Kat tells her. "I promise I'll still like you in the morning."

::

The next day, Kat shows Jo that she's a woman of her word.

She misses her class.


End file.
